Machine-Age Gadgets in a Space-Age Tale

In this mind-bending, elaborate anime, the industrial era is reimagined as a time of steam-powered aggression, with American capitalists arriving in London on a mission to fool Britannia. Scientists and speculators in the energy racket are eager to display their wares, souped-up steam engines that put awe-inspiring inventions in motion. But the bright ideas of the inventors are eclipsed by the dark drive for profits, and a young British boy named Ray (with the voice of Anna Paquin) slows down the troublemakers on their warpath.

The director Katsuhiro Otomo, known for the acclaimed "Akira," comes up with ingenious methods of giving machine-age gadgetry some space-age capabilities. Tubes, for instance, carry voices throughout a building, like a primitive intercom. This entire wedding-cake of a building soon lifts off like a rocket. And like many sci-fi heroes, young Ray enjoys the airborne joy ride on a personal jet pack.

The film borrows iconography from various hero quests, with Ray and his dad suffering through a Luke Skywalker-Darth Vader dynamic. Both father and son enjoy the same flirtation with the extreme, the chance to test their inventive powers even when the results veer toward destruction. As a venerable voice of reason, Ray's loin-clothed, oddly muscular grandfather displays hints of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, E.T. and the good half of Gollum.

A misguided tween called Scarlett O'Hara is London's newest arrival, in town to see the Crystal Palace and an exhibition therein. Scarlett is annoying and spoiled, but not completely heartless. As was briefly true of her "Gone With the Wind" namesake, she is aligned with war profiteers, who are slyly manipulating her. The girl is an industrial titan's daughter with a toy-size yap dog, Columbus; the two are an Industrial Revolution equivalent of Paris Hilton with her equally pampered chihuahua, Tinkerbell.

Like many a battle in the century to come, a Victorian era conflict is soon fought over fuel -- in this instance, "a stable liquid of exceptional purity, found in a cave in Iceland," we are told. Encased in a "steam ball," the substance can power massive airships, which in the wrong hands are havoc-wreakers. This special energy source is that reimagined era's highly enriched uranium -- a source of power in physics, economics and geopolitics.

Deceptive scientists and engineers toil in a mysterious building owned by the greedy capitalists of the O'Hara Foundation. Dignitaries soon arrive in Arab veils and Teutonic military attire, and robotic storm troopers burst forth for "a little demonstration," as Scarlett's Rasputin-like overseer calls it. But the display is far from harmless. Blood is spilled, glass is shattered and most indecorously of all, the Queen's benediction is interrupted. The film turns into a preposterous but engrossing spectacle, fueled by a resource more enduring than steam or its successors: big ideas.